No. of Recommendations: 9
If you have saved links to boards.fool.com posts, I've discovered web.archive.org. Just paste in the link to the field, and the original content (if they crawled it) comes up.
Example:
https://web.archive.org/web/20180821095317/http://...I did use web.archive.org to as a reference when designing the look and feel (though post editing colours/layout I did from memory), however it is very messy for the purpose of collecting the past board messages, with a lot of random inclusions in the server response.
I also do not have a reference to the URLs for all posts, which I would need to import via web.argchive.org, however .. the wonderful DataHelp search
http://www.datahelper.com/mi/search.phtml have extremely prudently collected a cache of all pages, so their search no longer merely holds the URL references (as I recall in the past) but now includes the post content itself.
At DataHelper, eleven TMF boards are covered including all MI and Berkshire history well over 20 years.
Mark Willcox from DataHelper had explicit permission by TMF to provide links to the boards.fool.com urls,
which makes enormous sense as it was keeping the content at TMF.
However.. having *both* the look and feel of TMF's old site, and indexing and hosting their past data looks - in
a word, wrong - to me. It doesn't pass the sniff test. I want to keep a good relationship with, and genuine
respect (even help) towards TMF, so for now I don't see the problem in pointing users here to the DataHelp
Search if they want to research past articles, rather than importing content here.
Here's the other reason: Users in practice people do *not* look far back to very distant posts *on routine basis* and
usually do that when they want particular data or to recall *something important*, and it is precisely in this
situation that the same people would not mind using a less convenient external tool like DataHelper.
That's my intuition (for now) anyway. Respect (and not just small but large respect) to all is a crucial part, which I'd never compromise.
Over time we should encourage authors to re-post just their own content here if they have particular articles that they really want published, which are otherwise invisible to any real audience, and even then they should add some standard suffix that shows respect to TMF as the original publisher.
- Manlobbi
